Do we over-emphasise the importance of youth aspirations?
By Jim Sumberg
In 1977, Kenneth Roberts of Liverpool University suggested it was a mistake to over-emphasise the role of aspirations and choice in determining how young people in the UK entered the labour market. Specifically, he wrote: “neither school leavers nor adults typically choose their jobs in any meaningful sense: they simply take what is available.”
Fast forward 40 years and we see that aspirations – and questions around them – have a central place in debates about Africa’s youth employment challenge. What do African youth aspire to? What factors influence their aspirations? Are their aspirations realistic, and how do they change over time? Can or should young people’s aspirations influence policy and programming? What research methods are useful when investigating aspirations?
But are today’s policymakers, development planners and researchers making the very mistake that Roberts warned against? Are they (we) over-emphasising the role of aspirations and choice in determining how young rural Africans enter the labour market?
Roberts’ warning was rooted in an analysis of what he called the “opportunity structures,” which, he theorised, create distinct routes that govern both young people’s entry into the labour force and subsequent career progress. These opportunity structures are formed by the inter-relationships within a web of determinants including place, family origins, gender, ethnicity and education, and labour market processes. It is not so much that opportunity structures leave the individual with absolutely no choice or room for manoeuvre, but rather that for poorer, less well educated, socially and/or geographically marginalised young people, choice is likely to be very tightly constrained. Put another way, opportunity structures mean that regardless of aspirations, for many young people the world (of work) is definitely not their oyster.
The main implication of opportunity structure theory is that change in how young people enter and progress in the labour market will come about, not as a result of higher aspirations, better choices or a few sessions of skills training, but by changing the determinants identified above and/or their interactions.
More specifically, it is through investment in infrastructure, and initiatives that address inequality by breaking down entrenched class and social barriers – opportunity structures – that real leverage can be applied to the youth employment challenge. Quality education is obviously a central part of the story, as is the governance of the labour market in ways that fully respect the principles of decent work.
Wait a moment, this sound like a long-term, back-to-basics social and economic development agenda, not the kind of high profile, youth-specific employment policy and programming that so many commentators are calling for.
Indeed!
Image: Kyle Taylor: 14 – Powerful Now (CC BY 2.0)
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